Thorn considered a quip about the biker granny and her piercings, but he couldn’t force it out. He wasn’t feeling lighthearted, might not get back to that state for a while.
Thorn picked up the last greasy curl of bacon and slipped it into his mouth. It hurt to eat. Chew, swallow. It hurt to think about eating.
They looked out at the lagoon for a while. Thorn worked on easing down slow breaths. One, two, three. See how many he could string together before Alex came back into his head. Her smile, her touch, her long limbs, the way she never strayed an inch from what was real and true. And then, hell, there was Lawton, too, something the old guy said, one of his pronouncements, one of his wacky jibes.
Thorn waved a gnat away. He cleared his throat and tapped a finger against Sugarman’s laptop lying on a table between them.
“Could you show me something?”
“On the computer?”
“Yeah, that thing with the photographs you were doing last week.”
Sugar gave him a wary look, then sighed, switched on the machine, and took Thorn through the steps of locating photo files and opening them.
Thorn was leaning over his shoulder, watching Sugar work the mouse pad to bring up photographs of his twin daughters.
“What’re you up to, Thorn? What’s going on in that head of yours?”
“I’ll tell you. Just not right now.”
He finished the lesson to Thorn’s satisfaction, then Sugar stood and walked out to the dock. He was still weak and moved like a man twice his age, but the doctors agreed he was in remarkable shape, considering he’d practically been drained of blood.
“Well, I’ll be damned,” Sugar called.
“What?”
“Your friend’s back.”
Thorn hobbled out to the dock.
A large snook was cruising the rocky ledges of the lagoon.
“Couldn’t be,” Thorn said.
“Looks like the same one to me.”
“What’s it been, less than a week, she’s got three lures in her lip already.”
“Four,” Sugar said. “Like she came back for you to clean her up again.”
“Or she’s just showing off.”
“What’re you going to do?”
Thorn watched the snook wavering through the clear water. Tough old warhorse looking for trouble.
“Let her be,” Thorn said. “Just let her be.”
About midnight, when Sugar began to snore in the guest room, Thorn stole through the house and carried the envelope with the photo and the papers out to his VW.
An hour later he parked half a block down the street from Alexandra’s. He turned into her walk and went to her front door. At the rear of the house, a single light burned in her bedroom. He didn’t let himself picture her or what she might be doing this late, alone.
Thorn stood on her porch and looked up at the roofline overhead. He’d fixed her leak at least, left her with some minor improvement. He stared at the patch of grass where he’d dropped on Carlos Morales’s back and stabbed him with the electric drill. Where he’d met Snake and first seen the photograph of the Liston-Clay fight. Where he and Lawton headed off to rescue Alex.
Through the front door Thorn heard the click of Buck’s nails coming down the hardwood floor of the hallway, then the dog began to snuffle at the edge of door as he caught Thorn’s scent. He whined once, then scratched a paw at the handle.
Thorn drew a breath and let it out. He slipped the cell phone from his pocket and lifted the lid of Alex’s mailbox and settled the phone inside. He turned and walked back to the sidewalk, then crossed that dark, empty street.
Yellow crime-scene tape still stretched across Alan Bingham’s front door. It took Thorn less than a minute to pry open a back window and crawl inside the photographer’s house.
Thorn found Bingham’s computer in a study piled with books. He didn’t turn on lights but used the streetlamp’s glow to guide him.
Permeating the house was the harsh, acrid reek of a death chamber: gunfire and ashes and blood. Thorn sat down at Bingham’s desk and found the switch to power up the computer.
It was minutes later that Thorn located the folders containing Alan Bingham’s digitally preserved photos. Not the high-quality resolution of the originals, but when Thorn enlarged them so they filled the entire computer screen, they were vivid and impressive. Below each photograph Alan Bingham had typed notes to himself, the kind of things one might scribble on the backs of old snapshots to remind oneself later who these people were and why they’d mattered so much at one time. The year, the date, the location, people’s names.
Thorn hadn’t actually known what he was looking for. He’d had a notion that he wanted to find an uncropped version of the boxing shot that included Lola King to positively confirm what he already believed.
It took him half an hour, scanning through files and folders until he found one labeled Cassius-Liston, ’64, and clicked it open.
He sat back in Alan Bingham’s chair and studied the image for several moments. It was better than he’d hoped. Lola was sitting in full view beside Meyer Lansky, and on the other end of their group there was a man with slick brown hair and a movie-star jawline seated next to Humberto Berasategui.
The caption beneath the photo named all but one of the people in row three. Five names Thorn already knew. Lola, Lansky, Runyon, King, Berasategui. Alan Bingham had not discovered Pauline Caufield’s name, but he did know the one person Thorn didn’t. The new man sitting beside Humberto was conventionally handsome and wore the relaxed smile of someone who had never suffered a doubt in his life. His name was Hadley S. Waters.
Thorn located the printer and switched it on and made a copy of Bingham’s uncropped photo.
He was trying to understand the meaning of what he’d just discovered. Bingham obviously knew who most of those people were and must have had some inkling that he’d captured on film an odd gathering, to say the least. Whether Alan knew more than that or suspected anything so extreme as what turned out to be the truth, Thorn could only guess. Bingham’s decision to include the photo in his exhibit may have been based on nothing other than aesthetic grounds, with the intriguing sidebar that some of the people in row three had become familiar public figures. What Bingham knew or may have suspected was a mystery that died with him.
It took Thorn another few minutes to locate the Internet search engine Sugarman preferred. In the empty slot, he typed Hadley S. Waters and sat back and looked at the screen fill up with information. Current director of the CIA. Leading contender for the Republican presidential nomination. Numerous photographs of Mr. Waters standing next to world leaders.
Thorn switched off the computer and climbed back out the window with his loot. He drove along the deserted streets to downtown Miami, located the main office building of the Herald, and parked in the visitors’ lot.
From two A.M. to sunrise Thorn scribbled on the legal pad he’d brought along. He made his handwriting as legible as possible and tried to keep his grammar under control and his sentences short and to the point.
Combining what Sugar had told him about the origin of Southwoods and the bribe Stanton King made to Meyer Lansky, Thorn sketched out the entire story. A woman scorned by her lover. Jorge Morales committing the unforgivable sin of rejecting Lola Henderson. And then a man so in love with Lola, he was willing to exhaust his family fortune to have his rival murdered in an attempt to win Lola’s affection. That personal story had fused with the political one. A group of young covert operatives trying their best to provoke a war.
Thorn kept it to the facts alone, leaving out speculation and guesswork about motives and avoiding any cheap psychologizing.
He was no practiced writer and had to wad up half the sheets on the pad before he was satisfied with his effort. Five double-spaced pages that spelled out the history of everything he knew, everything Gundy had told him and everything Sugar and Alex had learned. He left out only a couple of small self-incriminating parts. The base
ball bat, the gentle shove he gave Lola, assisting her on her last flight. He included what little he knew of Pauline Caufield, and her boss and former co-conspirator, Mr. Hadley S. Waters.
When he finished, the sun was breaking free of the Atlantic, and the Miami sky was rosy and streaked with stripes of darker pink and a few bright golden tendrils that coiled off the edges of the first clouds of the day.
As the morning shift flooded into the office building, Thorn joined them and managed to scoot past security and make his way to the sports desk.
He found the office he was looking for and entered. The secretary behind the desk was sipping coffee and listening to a talk show on the radio. She turned it down and asked Thorn if she could help him.
“Is Mr. Pope in?”
“Mr. Pope is on assignment. A golf tournament. Something I can do?”
“Could you see he gets this?”
Thorn handed her the envelope. Battered and bloodstained, it was stuffed with his own writing and Bingham’s uncropped photo and the one he’d displayed in his exhibit. Also there was the top-secret Southwoods document and the Xeroxed pages that included Mr. Pope’s own articles about Cassius from the winter of 1964.
“It’s not exactly a sports story,” Thorn said. “But there’s sports in it. A famous boxing match that happened not ten minutes from where we’re standing. And there’s murder and treason and some other things I don’t fully understand. It might call for a little more digging. And for sure it’s going to require some guts to take on the people the story will expose.”
The woman stared at him, and her hand drifted toward her phone as if she meant to summon security.
“I’ve always admired Mr. Pope’s writing. The way he gets straight to the truth. No wasted words, no bullshit. He strikes me as an honest man. This might not be a story he wants to write himself, but if he doesn’t, I know he’ll pass it on to the right person.”
The woman’s hand drew back from the phone.
“Is there a number where you can be reached?”
“Not really,” Thorn said. “I’m more of a pay-phone kind of a guy.”
She smiled uncertainly and he smiled back and left the office. He walked outside to his car, started the old wreck, and headed off. At this time of the morning it would take an hour and a half to work his way through the traffic back home to Key Largo.
He planned to spend the rest of the day sitting on his dock, staring at the sky. Maybe later on in the afternoon, if the spirit moved him, he’d tie a bonefish fly or two, then take the skiff out and test them on the flats. See if the old magic was still there.
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
MAGIC CITY
Copyright © 2007 by James W. Hall.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 2006050913
ISBN: 978-0-312-94747-7
St. Martin’s Paperbacks are published by St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.
Magic City Page 30
